A Few Pages After the First
No. Not quite. Nearly. Tomorrow. I know I said that yesterday. Well, I’m more caught up than I was yesterday. It still seems to me going well. I can risk saying that (I hope) because I know there will be days between now and the rmmph of March when it is not going well, when I am not a writer, I never was a writer, and I’m starting my retraining as a mechanic* in the next uptake.** Which is to say I know I’m going to be paying for good days whether or not I admit to having them so why not admit it? See: wrestling alligators, below.
Stardancer
I learned how hard it is to make a story. . . . I did learn to take something in the range of horrible/okay and shove it around into okay/pretty okay, even if I didn’t think it was anything I’d want to read. It’s HARD. I’d never realized before how much work it was, even for those gifted people in my classes who did “hear” their stories right off. Drafts and voice and tweaking and word choice and why is that character there again?
Thank you. Yes. It’s HARD. This is why The Urge to Kill people who offer to split the money with you if they give you their Great Idea and you do the dull stupid labour of writing it up because the idea is the hard part and besides you already have the name and the publishing contacts, is pretty overwhelming. Fortunately most of these offers come by post/email. Back in the days when I went to more live things and people used occasionally to offer this blithering asininity to my face civilised restraint was more difficult.
But. Yes. It’s like wrestling alligators. WHY IS THAT CHARACTER FOLLOWING ME AROUND? GO AWAY. YOU DON’T BELONG IN THIS STORY. Er. Do you? What have I missed this time? Writing is also brilliant and fascinating and enormous fun . . . but those alligators bite hard. And the regeneration of major body parts is tiring and demoralising and takes time, which you probably haven’t got.
EMoon
It’s downright scary sometimes how much your process is like my process…the whole thing about each character’s voice, each book’s voice, each book’s vocabulary, so sometimes I can’t hear the word I need–none of the first/second/third choice words works in that sentence and I can spend hours digging through dictionaries hoping to find the one right one. The stuff I have to write down (revolving door, uniform, etc.) that has to come out later because who cares, it doesn’t matter only some of the details DO matter and I don’t know which ones until the book’s done or nearly done.
Scary? Hmm. I find it exactly the opposite—this seems to me so obviously the way stories must break into storytellers’ brains, get heard/figured out, get written, that I find it far more unsettling when I hear about some other writer’s entirely different process. Those people who write out complete outlines—story arcs, what happens in each chapter, characters’ names, descriptions and relationships—people who create files on different aspects of story and characters before they ever settle down to write the story part of the story—that’s scary. I went through a period when I was a teenager of (mostly) secretly reading everything I could get my hands on on how to write—secretly as one pursues any vice, or any unadmitted longing—and some of the advice clings round me still in cold, sticky, cobwebby sorts of shreds. I absolutely believe in ‘whatever works’ but . . . brrrr for the file-keepers.
I mostly don’t write down stuff that will come out later. I tend to have faith that if I’ve left something out it’ll clamour to get into the next draft. Certainly stuff does come out, but not usually the revolving door and the doorperson’s uniform. But I do keep some notes as I go, and sometimes the marginal notes to the notes to the notes (to the notes) get a little cramped.
* * *
* jaccairn
Also, MOT – I think I remember that yours is due sometime this month, It’s the sort of thing that might slip your mind when you’re so busy.
Snork. The things some people’s blog forum members remember. Thank you. Yes, Wolfgang is due this month and I’ve already booked him in.^ I hope you’re impressed. I’m so impressed I can hardly bear myself. (I think this is the first year I’ve ever remembered before the last minute.) Now I just have to implore the weather gods to be kind since the remains of the bus system between here and Warm Upford is not worth discussing. Hellhounds and I can perfectly well walk home one day and walk back the next, but not if we’re having gales and hail and winged monkeys and so on. Which we’re apparently going to have overnight. This is all because Peter had planned to go to Oxford tomorrow and have lunch with one of his cousins. No, no! said the weather gods, shaking themselves out of their long winter slumber, we can’t have promiscuous peregrinations! Where is that blizzard, we know we put it somewhere! —It hasn’t got up to freezing the last three days^^ and now we’re supposed to have SNOW. Ah . . . frell. Well, my yaktrax have been lonesome so far this winter . . . and snow will certainly keep me at home where I have nothing better to do than work. . . . ^^^
^ And he has to pass. Has to. In the first place I can’t afford a new car this year. In the second place . . . I still don’t want a new car. I want a new car less and less as I hear friends with shiny new cars talking about the way the computers in new cars run their lives. And go wrong, of course. You can learn to ignore that little flashing red light on the dashboard after the third time you’ve taken it in and paid £100 to be told there’s nothing wrong. Not so much the robot voice continuously telling you to fasten your seatbelt/add grinchflobby fluid to the ziggury system/placate the trolls with ham sandwiches.
^^ And my chocolate cosmos hate being indoors, so they’ll probably frelling croak this year too. Arrrgh. Furthermore, my gladiola bulbs arrived today. Gladiola bulbs are tender. Mail warehouses are rarely heated. At least mail warehouses where tender plants are held are rarely heated. Arrrgh. Don’t these mail-order bozos ever, you know, listen to the weather forecast? Hey, guys, we’re supposed to get three foot of snow tomorrow! Let’s ship all the banana trees!
^^^ Ajlr
I also wondered what the reaction of the hellhounds had been to the new Amazingly Loud Voice?
Chaos has always found my singing . . . disturbing. Darkness has always assumed that it’s just another daft human activity. It is perhaps hard on hellhounds that both at the mews and the cottage their bed is next to the piano/cheap electric keyboard. Chaos gets up and moves toward me cautiously, staring at my distorted face for clues. GO LIE DOWN YOU WRETCHED DOG.
I’m more worried about the neighbours. Do you remember—probably nearly a year ago now—I was fretting about singing at the cottage, where my office, with the keyboard in it, has the common wall with my semi-detached neighbour? (The keyboard itself, plugged into headphones, is silent.) The wall is floor-to-ceiling with bookshelves, but I can still hear my neighbour climbing the stairs on the other side. Don’t worry, said Nadia, you don’t make nearly enough noise.
I think I probably do make enough noise now. Ah, the disadvantages of success. I can still sing while I do the washing-up—it’s on the far side from the common wall. I also sing out hurtling, while hellhounds pretend they don’t know me, and my impression is that people are starting to move to the opposite pavement (I used to think this was just a reaction to rampant hellhounds). Hey, this probably happens to Deborah Voigt too. I wish it had any effect on aggressive off lead dogs.
** The GUARDIAN is running a publicity draw to win a full degree Open University course. Details tomorrow. The OU is highly thought of so I, who don’t have nearly enough to do, had an idle look through their course list. Their language department is terrible. French, German, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Welsh (Welsh?^) and Latin and (classical) Greek. That’s it?
^ Yes, I know, good for them, Celtic languages are struggling for survival, but in the context of only six modern languages offered it seems to me a bit startling.
DAYS LIKE THIS SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A DOG.*
So let’s have an Ask Robin to distract me.
I’ve been wondering what was the first ever memorable story you wrote/wrestled with? I don’t mean the first one you had published, but the first one you can recall pouring your heart and soul into and deciding that you wanted to be an author/writer from that point on.
Never. It is a revelation to me every day that I’m a professional writer. I’ve become enough used to it that I no longer wake up every morning [sic] expecting to find out that I sell shoes** at Wal-Mart*** but I do still wake up every morning amazed . . . which is not a bad thing really. It’s not only a rush, it keeps you at it. How did I get this lucky, you know? Stop mooning around and keep working. Yes ma’am.
I’ve always told stories. Before I knew that’s what I was doing, I did it.† I told stories before I had words, and certainly before I could read and write: and yes, I can remember a few of these, but I’m not sure I can describe them. Once you have words it’s hard to go back. But story-telling for me is just part of my experience of living in the world. Everything is part of a story. It’s only a question of whichever way the fragment you’re contemplating chooses to run, and whether you have the time and inclination to follow. How many of you wander around humming random hums? Hands up, please. I bet there are a lot. You don’t do it to do it, you just do it. You’re built that way. You just find yourself doing it. Some of your hums may be fragments of other people’s real composed music, but some of them are just playing with sound.†† And you may go on to nail down a hum on a piece of paper and create (or try to create) a proper piece of music around it, but that’s later, and that’s something else, and it doesn’t discount or disparage the hums if you never turn them into best selling power ballads. Story-telling is like that for me.††† I tell stories anyway. That I can write some of them down and make people pay me for them is a bonus.
* * *
* Or a hellhound. I had a am-I-coughing-in-my-sleep^-or-is-that-a-hellhound-yowling-to-go-out-NOW? morning. Plus delightful clean-up duty. Plus the guy with the very long squeegee who does my first^^ floor windows showed up^^^ and I didn’t dare let him into the back garden, which was reserved for urgent hellhound activity.
And then there was the continuing to stream, the continuing to cough, and the continuing to not get enough sleep. Whimper. I just don’t get the coughing. How can bodies be so perverse?
And then there was going to the vet. And this time our client was Chaos, who has a Vet Phobia, and turns into the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper every time he is dragged across that fell threshold, so that was even lovelier. He has a Vet Phobia, as I’m sure I’ve told you, because some arrogant little chickie of a wet new post grad vet and who didn’t have a clue what was wrong with him gave him one of those full-spectrum antibiotic jabs that are known to hurt, how dare you be stochastic and PAINFUL with my dog??, and then got all shirty when he screamed, and said that whippets were ‘wimpets’. She’s lucky she got out alive, but I didn’t find out till later that she’d chosen her treatment because she had no idea. Oh, and this is after she had told me that I ought to get them neutered. That that’s what responsible owners do.
She’s gone on to make some other veterinary surgery a joy for everyone, but I am left with a hellhound with a vet phobia.^^^^
Chaos is also one of these dogs that after you have broken up his pills into tiny crumbs and mixed them in carefully with the nice drooly chicken scraps, carefully eats all around them because of course they are a non-food-stuff and are in his bowl in error. So then you get to wodge up all the crumbs into a mushy glob and shove it/them down his throat. DOGS. YAAAAAAAAAAAH.
Handbells, this evening, for some mysterious reason, were relatively successful. Niall even started making calls. I don’t DO calls in bob major. It was another situation, as it so often is, that the other three have rung MILLIONS of touches of bob major in the tower, and they tell me eagerly, oh, it’s just like bob minor EXCEPT WITH TWO MORE BELLS! Yes, and driving a car is just like riding a bicycle except with TWO MORE WHEELS! Oh, and an engine. Spare me. I can, in fact, get through a course of plain bob major in the tower (probably), because I ring it on handbells. It’s EASIER in the tower.
^ which would not be the first time. I’ll take any sleep I can get.
^^ American second
^^^ His schedule is known only to himself, although I believe it has something to do with prophetic dreams, tea leaves and the curious incident of how many times the dog in the night-time barked.+
+ Maybe it had the streamings, and needed to go out. The original silent hound evidently had excellent digestion.
^^^^ Today’s vet was another recent vintage grad but . . . golly. Not only was she sweet to my hopelessly neurotic hellhound . . . well, if I were thirty years younger and single, I’d ask for her phone number. I think I could work out the gay thing as I went along.
** I think I could get into selling All Stars.
*** But not at Wal-Mart.
† I personally believe that the human critter is hard-wired to tell stories like we’re hard-wired to learn language. But story-telling may get squeezed or belittled or misunderstood out of the functional part of you, like other bits of our potentials got squeezed out of those of us who are convinced we cannot possibly do maths or hard science or whatever else.
†† And as jumping-off places other people’s work is the greatest. I’ve said many times that I learnt a lot writing appalling Tolkien pastiche.^ I am one of the humourless frumps who say no to ‘fan fiction’ but as a private learning experience that never sees the light of any computer screen but your own, trash my stories with my blessing, and may you go on to write your own books that will make me laugh and cry.^^
^ Infinitely direr than the bad Kipling pastiche for some reason. Probably because Kipling is not forsoothly. On the other hand, I learnt not to be forsoothly from Tolkien.
^^ Or distract me from coughing and no sleep. Any book that can do that is better than the Pulitzer Prize.
††† I also wander around the house humming.^ But it took formal voice lessons to get that started again. I used to hum random hums when I was a kid, but it was disruptive or impolite or whatever, and I was taught to stop. Of course kids have to learn to behave appropriately, but I wish we as a species or at least as a culture could learn better methods to teach kids, for example, that singing off-pitch is also the precursor to singing on-pitch,^^ or that if you want to tell a story about a flying dragon you don’t have to worry about the frelling physics of frelling flight right away, or even about how Marigold got back from Madagascar/the grocery store so quickly. It’ll come. Go with what you’ve got.
^ Or I did till about a fortnight ago SIIIIIIIIIGH.
^^ I know. We’ve had this conversation in the forum.
Lurgy Update*
It was such a gorgeous day today that hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle, despite my feeling about as lively as that mess in the bottom of your gutters, thanks to another of those ten-hours-in-bed, two-hours-of-broken-sleep nights.** I’m catching up on back issues of magazines. I’ve thrown a few more books against the wall.*** I finally downloaded BEJEWELED from the iTunes store because I’m keep hearing that it’s the original and still the best of those line-up-the-same-shape/colour-things-they-go-bang-and-you-get-points games. It’s okay, although I could do without the Fu Manchu voiceover. It’s not as good as MONTEZUMA.
But when I finally crawled permanently out of bed† it was a beautiful blue sunny day and the frelling birds were frelling singing and the hellhounds were all over me†† and I, drowning in guilt as I am because all things considered they’ve been very good about my less than impeccable maintaining of standards the last week and some†††, decided, okay, countryside is in order, and we went out to seek same. And it really was pretty fabulous. We didn’t even meet any unusually savage off-lead dogs.‡
katinseattle
I want more Mongo. I want a whole book of Mongo.
No pressure.
Certainly not. I’m very relieved, since I’ve been working to this plan since the last time we had this conversation. Mongo did, in fact, break training in a big way today . . . noooooooo you moron you were told to [mmrgllrrrmph]. This is not how this scene went last time. Yelp! Arrrgh! Yaaaah! —It’s going to go a lot differently with Mongo in it. I so need sleep.
blondviolinist
You know how there’s Team Gale and Team Peeta for the HUNGER GAMES trilogy? And Jodi Meadows wants Team Sylph and Team Dragon for her INCARNATE trilogy?‡
I’m on team Mongo.
::Beams::
* * *
* Does anyone else keep having their eye caught by the ‘12’ of our new year and have brief dazzled moments of thinking that means it’s still last month? Or is that just someone with a lurgy and a deadline the end of the month that unfortunately it is?
** Colin and I have been emailing lethargically back and forth today, ostensibly about tower ringing tomorrow night, but a certain amount of reciprocal whining has crept into the conversation. I admit I’m a bit relieved that not everybody else that has this lurgy is all shiny and new after three days. Uuuuuuungh. And unless I’ve developed bubonic plague by tomorrow I probably will go ringing. I may not be able to do much but ring rounds for beginners, but Colin has beginners who need rounds rung for them, and it would at least mean pulling on a bell rope. Maybe Colin and I can cough in harmony.
*** I’m an even nastier reader when I’m ill and short of sleep.
† Having wept through the sound of my bells ringing.
†† I was talking to a friend today who’d been ill in the night too. She has cats. And while she was sitting in the bathroom at a totally untoward hour having a small private self-absorbed moan, as one does under these circumstances, the cats were of course all over her. Hey! You’re up! Great! Aren’t you glad to see us? Aren’t you going to feed us? Barring the ‘feed us’ part, hellhounds have a similar reaction. Hey! You’re up! Hey! All these critters that sleep about twenty hours a day and don’t care which four they’re awake for are very disorienting . . . when you’re pretty disoriented anyway. But last night I kept coming downstairs for more (filtered) water and fetching more magazines, and then back upstairs again getting up for a pee because I’m drinking all this flaming water, and by the time I officially let hellhounds out of their crate they were all it took you long enough. So, we’re going out NOW, right? I wonder if they could learn the concept of ‘dressing gown’?^
^ Mongo could. The problem with the Mongos of the world is that they do not sleep twenty hours a day, and they need stuff to do. If you don’t give them stuff to do, they will find stuff to do.
††† Here four bright beady little eyes roll significantly toward the sofa. You just keep giving us extra sofa time, beloved hellgoddess, they say, and much may be forgiven.^
^ I’m also practising using the argleblarging new TV set up with the new freeview, non-satellite box and the forty-seven new remotes.+ I’m practising in case the Nice TV Man turns out to have more little stories he would like professional writers’ opinions on. Why don’t people do their homework. His manuscript starts with an elaborate description of what the first illustration should be. Two seconds—okay, maybe twelve seconds—on any reputable how-to-write-for-kids site will tell you this is not what you do.
I realise the line about what is acceptable advice-seeking and what isn’t may be blurry in some areas. I try to double-check before I ask Gemma any medical questions, for example, that I’m asking out of my natural, not to say pathological, inquisitiveness, and not out of a desire for free advice.++ And she’s also a friend, and I give friends a whole lot of slack because I think if you actually know someone who does something it’s reasonable to ask them first, and if she started asking me about illustrations in kids’ books I’d just tell her what I know. Which is not, in fact, much, and she’d be better off researching some good how-to-write-for-children web sites.
And if this joker had said, the first time he was here, oh, hey, wow, you’re professional writers? Say, I’m writing a children’s book, and I wanted to know how detailed I should make the descriptions of the illustrations, maybe you can tell me?, I would have. There wouldn’t even have been any blood loss (probably). But he shows up on our (Peter’s) doorstep without warning one afternoon with his frelling story in his frelling hand? No. Not on.+++
So I don’t want to have to ask him any more questions about the TV. So I’m practising. I’m not watching TV, mind you, but when I’m going to be lying on the sofa for a while, I turn it on.
Ajlr
I’m so sorry to hear that The Cough is still unwilling to leave, Robin. I hate that feeling one gets where it seems as if one’s brain is going to be shaken out through one’s forehead at the very next convulsion.
I tend to specialise in the brains-leaking-out-your ears cough. Whatever that is that is causing intolerable pressure on my forehead is unlikely to be brains.
Yesterday while I was not watching television there was something so clearly bizarre on the screen that I found myself distracted from the book I was going to throw across the room in a minute anyway#. Eventually I figured out how to call up ‘information’ and was apprised that this was a film called ‘The Trail of the Screaming Forehead’ in which a small harmless American town is taken over by . . . alien foreheads. Ahem. I think whoever came up with this idea was having a really bad case of flu-with-pounding-headache at the time and had been hitting the cough medicine a lot harder than is safe.
+ They breed. Like coathangers and odd socks.
++ Even over here, where we do have the NHS, so the absolute question of money is not acute, doctors in their off-duty hours are off duty.
+++ I am a curmudgeon. But we knew that. And I haven’t read it—that’s Peter’s self-immolation. But Peter mentioned the illustration thing, and I picked the ms up off the table and . . . yup.
# Carefully missing the Christmas tree. I’m not even feeling shame about its continued upness yet. Hey, I’m sick.
‡ Although the herd of pygmy rhinoceros was a surprise.
‡‡ Team Sylph and Team Dragon? Ewwwwww. I’m on Team Sam.
In which Mongo is comforting
It’s after one frelling a.m. and I haven’t started the blog yet. Since one of the ways I avoid thinking about how much time the bangleflandadblinging blog eats is by starting that night’s post in the (comparatively) early evening and then writing it in driblets while I work on something else at the same time* this is bad. What else I’m doing may not be very demanding—if I weren’t half thinking about the blog I might not find out after it’s too late that I’ve once again ordered enough plants for next season to fill all New Arcadia’s gardens** for example—the point is merely that when it’s AAAAAAUGH o’clock and for frell’s sake I started the beastly blog hours and hours ago . . . at least it hasn’t all been the blog. When I’m up against it like this there’s nowhere to hide. I have to write it and I have to write it NOW.
Today’s problems began last night as they so often do. Yesterday was seriously bad anyway because I had to get up whether I’d had any sleep or not (I hadn’t), so today I decided I would simply stay in bed till I’d had enough sleep. It might be February. Well, it wasn’t, but it took about twelve hours to get about six hours’ sleep, between the cough, the sleeping sitting up because of the cough which means that not only aren’t you sleeping very well even when you’re sleeping, when you wake up to pee again because you keep drinking water from the sad delusion it will dampen your flaming throat, you are crippled with muscle spasms. Woman was not made to sleep sitting up. Fortunately the hellhounds are so accustomed to ignoring my screaming at inanimate objects that they don’t react to my screaming at . . . me. Which either says something rather ominous about the success of my tendency to anthropomorphize (or at least critter-morphize) computers, furniture, articles of clothing and little noodgy objects, or it says something even more ominous about my status the last few flu-addled days. Or it may just be they don’t recognise the harsh rasping croaks that are the extent of my vocalisation lately as having anything to do with the hellgoddess.***
Anyway. Twelve hours eats a vicious hole in your day. I’m still too enfeebled to think about pulling on a bell rope so, barring some half-speed hurtling and a cup of tea with Oisin†, all I’ve been doing ALL FRELLING DAY is working on SHADOWS. So I haven’t got anything to tell you about.
* * *
Maggie has (also) had a bad day, and last night was pretty stressful too.†† There have been skeletons coming out of closets and bogeys from the corners. The world is not the shape she thought it was. And she has just withstood a creepy-making conversation about when what you have is a relationship and when what you have is a parasite. And why do we keep pets anyway?
* * *
I looked down. Mongo hadn’t quite given up on the possibility of more sandwich. He was sitting beside my chair with his head pressing rather heavily against my leg. When he saw me looking at him his tail, of course, began to wag. “Trombone,” I said, and he leaped up and shot away to look for his rubber trombone. It wasn’t a fair command: I should know where it was before I sent him after it. You want to reinforce your training with success. But I wanted my parasitic dog to show off how clever he was. I heard him scurrying around the living room. Not there. He made a quick pass down the hall to the front door, but the dining room door was closed. It wouldn’t be in the dining room. He scampered upstairs. I heard him nudging the door to my bedroom open. It might be under the desk or the bed. No. Not in the bathroom either. (Dog toys occasionally got in the bathroom as the result of the drama of baths.) Damn. It was probably in the back yard then. Damn. Use your brain, Margaret Alastrina, not your stupid emotions. He’s not going to find it and he’s going to be unhappy and feel that he’s failed. Which will be your fault.
Mongo flung himself downstairs again. I might be giving up hope but he wasn’t. I was just about to get up and open the back door, which was better than not doing anything, but dogs have a strong sense of fairness and Mongo would know I hadn’t played fair with him, even if he forgave me, which he would. But he trotted to the back door himself without looking at me. And reared up on his hind legs, took the handle in his mouth and pulled down. The door snicked open.
I had never taught him to do this.
He ran outside and found the trombone under a rosebush.** He came dancing back in with it again (I admit he didn’t close the door behind him) and laid it proudly at my feet. “You are wonderful and amazing,” I said, “good dog.” I got up and fed him the last slice of chicken from Val’s sandwich-making. I also closed the back door. Then I put the plate that had had the sandwiches on it on the floor so he could lick up all the crumbs.
“I can live with ‘parasite’,” I said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
* * *
* This does not include the hours I spend reading up on South American vampire bats when I meant just to be checking the spelling of ‘pipistrelle’, or trying to find a nice neat short definition of the difference between quantum theory, quantum mechanics, and quantum physics^ so that if I’m going to make a fool of myself I can do it forthrightly and in full cognizance, or googling not quite at random in pursuit of that perfectly off the wall metaphor that I know is out there waiting for me on . . . just . . . the . . . next . . . opening . . . screen.
^ Which appears to depend on who you read. A bit like asking what the difference between fantasy and science fiction is.
** Hey. It’s a small town.
*** Hellhounds are actually being very patient with me. They are not getting hurtled to their standard full extent due to human infirmity^ and I don’t dare let them off lead because I can’t call them back. You don’t realise just how much you use your voice for things other than conversation till you haven’t got it to use.
^ My dogminder costs. Put me in my All Stars and I can still walk.
† I forgot to remind him to boil the mug I used for forty-eight hours and then let it stand in bleach for a fortnight. He’ll probably remember. It’s a little hard to miss that there’s something wrong with me. Oh, and he claims he’s going to write me another blog post.^ And he has the new Finale update. Sob. Lust. Loooooonging.
^ If this is pity, I’ll take it.
†† Although there was a Very Cute Boy.
††† Sic. Maggie’s mom likes roses.
Yet another day of no brain and too much coughing
Comprehensive ickiness marches on. Booooooring. Last night I not only had insomnia but The Cough decided to demonstrate what it could really do. I had no idea it hadn’t been trying previously.*
So, between having done nothing today** and having no brain to make something up, I will depend on forum comments for structure an d(apparent) progression tonight. . . .
Anne_D
+ And I’m the only person on the planet who didn’t/doesn’t like THE SOPRANOS or David Tennant.
Nope, not the only one. Tennant is my least favorite of the new Doctors. Never watched The Sopranos, but from the clips I’ve seen and the reviews I’ve read, it’s not my sort of thing.
My problem with the Sopranos is that it’s about a nice normal (which is to say completely banjaxed and dripping with neuroses and relationship problems) American family . . . who happen to kill people. Because they’re Mafia. Whatever. The point is they kill people. This is just part of the set up. It’s supposed to provide depth or irony or something. Ewwwww. No. I’m not going there. Killing people is not a normal, acceptable response to business and personal failures. It is not a healthy, positive way to deal with rivalries and frustrations. You want to have a story about going around killing people, you need vampires, werewolves and evil magicians.
I sat through several episodes at irregular intervals because I had so many friends who loved it. I’m not all that interested in endless developmental rehashings of personal troubles**, which left the murders. Squicky.
EMoon
No, ma’am, you’re not. David Tennant’s acting in ANYthing (including the modern-dress Hamlet production in which he played Hamlet–a miscasting if ever there was one) seemed to be limited to acting bugf*ck crazy with his eyes bulging out.
Well, yes. Exactly. He makes me look composed and serene. Take a Valium, David, and sit down.
Sanderling
But this pretty much explains everything, in my mind – for two years, anytime anything went into their mouth they were left feeling pretty awful. I’d stop wanting to eat after that, too.
Yes, well, it’s not that straightforward. They have spells when they’re all over their food like normal dogs, especially Darkness. Chaos, even enthusiastic, runs to the end of his enthusiasm pretty fast. There have been moments when I’ve thought I might even get a little weight on Darkness. (These moments go away again.) But you never know when or why such a spell is going to come on—or how long it’ll stick around. Their moods vary from day to day . . . and meal to meal. Sometimes the Don’t-Eat Fairy coshes them halfway through what was looking like a total gulping-down epiphany. At least one more item that has to be added to the list of Things Robin Must Brace Herself to Be Made Crazy By however is the notorious sighthound indifference to food. Salukis are infamous for this. Deerhounds are too. My guys are one-eighth deerhound—although one of the whippets of the previous generation belonged to the Food Is Optional philosophy too. She was a very sweet dog, but completely, ahem, barking, and I have a fair range of experience of canine peculiarities.
Diane in MN
. . . I’ll stop talking about it in case Teddy’s bad angel starts getting ideas. DOGS. Yes.
Chaos is squirting again. )(*&^%$£”!!!!!!! DOGS. NO. Next time it’s cheetahs or axolotls.
Claning
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WHY DO I HAVE THE LURGY WHEN I AM A PARAGON OF VIRTUE? |
Some health advocates do make it sound almost as though germs are only incidental to diseases and if you get sick it is ALL YOUR FAULT.
Yes, because you haven’t done it THEIR WAY. Here their book only costs £49.99, the cheap rate at the local gym will only rip £1200 out of your flesh every year and the class/machine/trainer you want won’t always be unavailable, the supplements you absolutely must have will only be another £100/month, and the special organic food and fashionable superfoods won’t do much more than quadruple your grocery bill. It’s your health, isn’t it? What are you waiting for?
MNCathy
. . . we took our dog . . . to an off-lead dog park this summer and she went to investigate a pond and somehow fell in. She is not a water dog. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a look of puzzlement on a dog’s face at finding herself knee-deep in water, and she got out fast. A young Labradorcame along shortly thereafter, and she stood and watched in disbelief as it chased around in the water. She clearly thought it was mad.
Yes. There are water dogs and there are not water dogs. Mavis, my dog minder, asked me a couple of times last summer when it was beltingly hot if the hellhounds really wouldn’t get in the river to cool off and I said they haven’t yet. Darkness has fallen in twice by stalking a duck too near the edge, but he has rocketed straight back out again without pause to invest in the experience. I’ve twice waded in on hot days*** and tried to persuade them to join me, but they stand on the shore with that alert, patient look that many dogs get when you’re doing something even more doolally than usual and they’re hoping that it’s not going to interfere with your taking them home again by the most scenic possible route to their nice comfy dog bed (we say nothing about food).
In my deranged and poverty-stricken youth, I used to housesit for an aging lab who had to be prevented from plunging into the Maine Atlantic in the winter because it was hard on his rheumatism.
Mrs Redboots
The first of your recipes is known in my family as “Cow cake”, especially when iced with chocolate butter icing as my mother cuts it into portions whose size resembled that of the concentrate then fed to dairy cattle.
I love this. LOVE LOVE LOVE. Cow cake. That’s it forever. —It is one of those recipes that everyone has a version of. But I’ve never heard it called cow cake before. Hee hee hee hee hee hee. I personally much prefer the digestive-biscuit version to the rice-krispies version that I saw far more of when I was a kid. Although this may have had to wait till I discovered digestive biscuits, which we didn’t have in the States when I was young. Graham crackers or vanilla wafers just aren’t as good.
BlueRose
It appears your computer equipment is possessed by all nine circles of gremlins. Have you considered something other than Outlook – like Thunderbird?
Outlook is a right bitch to deal with if it decides it doesn’t like you, and if you DON’T need the appt bit then Tbird will sort your email side right out.
And I imagine you have all your appts on your iphone anyway
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You have not fathomed the depths of my daily shame. My appointments are in my small paper pocket Ringing World diary. †
I did ask Raphael why I’m on Outlook, and it’s as I was expecting: he says that given the sinister conflation of my somewhat unusual requirements plus what local broadband support is available plus what the archangels themselves can do, Outlook is still the least of evils.
Sigh.
Mrs Redboots
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. . . the only problem with 1571 is that you actually have to pick up the phone and listen to the dial tone to know that you’ve got a message . . . |
The message on ours (recorded by me!) says “You’re welcome to leave a message, but as we are very bad at checking for messages, please ring our mobiles!”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I try to prevent people from even knowing I have a mobile phone. ‘Oh that pink iPhone-shaped case that I wear around my neck at all times? Oh, no, it’s an emergency bar of chocolate.’
* * *
* Somebody tell me what frelling evolutionary advantage is conferred upon one who has insomnia and/or hosts a cough. Being able to get by on very little sleep would be great, but that’s nothing to do with the experience of insomnia: maybe you’re awake when the camp guard has nodded off and you see the sabre-tooth tiger creeping toward the headman’s baby and you raise the alarm.^ But next day when you move camp they’re going to have to carry you, you’re so tired . . . and they aren’t going to. Every early prehuman for him/herself. So the sabre-tooth tiger gets you instead, next night.^^
I can’t remember if there’s any actual science for this or not, or whether it’s just the obvious joke that every semi-literate menopausal woman since Darwin has made, but that your caloric requirements plummet the moment you’re no longer fertile makes some sense. That provides another pair of hands to tend the tribe’s children while the young women are either pregnant or foraging, and these hands increase the likelihood of more kids surviving and don’t cost the tribe anything.
Insomnia? Coughs? Successful parasites don’t kill their hosts. Coughing gets you left behind too, and you may be glad to see that tiger.
^ Or maybe you don’t. The kid’s a brat, and is going to grow up to be another big stupid bully like his dad.
^^ Or possibly not. It may still be full of headman’s brat.
** Except a few paragraphs of SHADOWS. Not enough paragraphs, but still . . . paragraphs.
*** Yes: there goes 90% of all nongenre story-telling media. I’m a lowbrow^, what can I tell you.
^ With a few exceptions. Most of which (Eliot, Trollope, Dickens) I would be happy to argue are genre really.
† Remember that a ‘river’ in England is any minor concavity that contains at least one teacup of water for at least forty-eight hours once a year. By these standards New Arcadia has quite a nice little river. It’s still only knee high in the middle.
†† http://www.ringingworld.co.uk/purchase/diary-calendar-other/diary.html